The words were painted in bright red on the banner hung over the wall near the forty-yard line of Texas Stadium, hume of the Dallas Cowboys football team, on Sunday afternoon.

The guys in silver and blue were struggling to stay in the race for the playoffs. So a dyed-in-the-wool Cowboy fan decided he would offer some back-home encouragement straight out of his country-western repertoire. He scratched around his garage on Saturday and found some paint, a big brush, and a ruler ... then splashed those words on a king-sized bed sheet for all America to read:

It was his way of saying, "We're hanging in there. Don't count us out. We have three games left before anybody can say for sure ... so we're not givin' up! The opra ain't over."

Sure is easy to jump to conclusion, isn't it? People who study trends make it their business to manufacture out of their imaginations the proposed (and "inevitable") end result. Pollsters do that, too. After a sampling of three percent of our country, vast and stunning stats are predicted. Our worry increases. We are all informed that so-and-so will, for sure, wind up doing such-and-such. At times it's downright scary. And discouraging.

Every once in a while it's helpful to remember times when those folks wound up with egg on their faces. Much to our amazement, the incredible often happens.

- Like when Wellington whipped Napoleon
- Or Truman beat Dewey
- And Washington won in the Rose Bowl
- Like the time the earthquake didn't hit
- And England didn't surrender
- And Star Wars didn't grab a fistful of Academy Awards
- And Hitler wasn't the anti-Christ
- And the communists didn't take over America by 1980
- And a nation could continue on through the disillusionments of Vietnam, White House and senatorial scandals, assassination attempts, energy crises, nuclear mishaps, and economic recessions.

Yes, at many a turn we have all been tempted to jump to so-called "obvious conclusions, only to be surprised by a strange curve thrown our way. God is good at that. When He does, it really encourages His people.

Can you recall a few biblical example?

- A wiry teenager, armed with only a sling and a stone, whipped a giant over nine feet tall. Nobody would've predicted that.
- With an Egyptian army fast approaching and no possible way to escape, all looked bleak. But not so! Against nature and reversing the pull of gravity, a sea opened up and allowed the Hebrews to walk across.
- And how about the vast, "indestructible" wall around Jericho? Who would've imagined?
- Or that dead-end street at Golgotha miraculously opening back up at an empty tomb three days later?
- Or a handful of very human disciples turning the world upside down?

Anybody -- and I mean anybody -- who would have been near enough to have witnessed any one to those predicaments would certainly have said, "Curtains ... the opra is over!"

A lot of you who read this page are backed up against a set of circumstances that seem to spell T-H-E E-N-D. All looks almost hopeless. Pretty well finished. Apparently over. Maybe you need to read that again, underlining those words:

seem to ... almost ... pretty well ... apparently.

Your adversary would love for you to assume the worst. He'd enjoy seeing you have a sign and resign yourself to depressed feelings that accompany defeat, failure, maximum resentment, and minimum faith. After all, it's fairly obvious you're through. Well ... since when has "fairly obvious" drawn the curtain on the last act? It's been my experience that when God is involved, anything can happen. The One who directed that stone in between Goliath's eye and split the Red Sea down the middle and leveled that wall around Jericho and brought His Son back from beyond takes a delight in mixing up the odds as He alters the obvious and bypasses the inevitable.

The blind songwriter, Fanny Crosby, put it another way:

Chords that were broken will vibrate once more.

In other words, don't manufacture conclusion. Don't ever think in terms of "this is the way things will turn out." Be open. Stay that way. God has a beautiful way of bringing good vibrations out of broken chords. When the Lord is in it, anything is possible. In His performances there are dozens of "fat ladies" waiting to sing the finale.

The opra ain't over

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